Media

November 01, 2015

It’s long been known that a leader can gain power by rallying the people against a boogeyman.

And it helps when that boogeyman is real.

When CNBC’s GOP debate moderators couldn’t help but be sanctimonious, supercilious, and self-important Wednesday night, they did more than provoke a response from their intellectual superiors. They did more than further reveal the Establishment Media as a left-wing monolith, further discredit themselves, and further cement in minds that they’re comic-book versions of journalists.

October 25, 2015

Take the money and run. With the huge windfall enjoyed by the Mohamed family — of clock-bomb-arrest fame — in “Islamophobic” America, one might think that little clock-maker extraordinaire Ahmed Mohamed would head to Switzerland for an internship with Rolex. Instead, news is his whole family is moving to Qatar after the boy accepted a scholarship from the Qatar Foundation for Education. Because, you know, if you’re interested in pushing back scientific frontiers, the Islamic world is where you go.

Now, Qatar is an interesting choice. Its official state religion is Wahhabi Islam — this is also the dominant faith in Saudi Arabia. And like Saudi Arabia, the nation’s main source of legislation is Sharia law (I’m sure Ahmed’s sisters will love it {and maybe they will}). It’s quite telling, however, that the Mohamed clan would choose such a place, although not surprising, really. With Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed (talk about wearing out a name), being a Muslim activist who twice ran for the Sudan’s presidency, it wouldn’t be surprising if these people were “true believers.”

But what I really want to discuss are those other destructive true believers, in all things politically correct, who averred Crock Boy was Clock Boy and dubbed him an inventor. This brings us to the main point, something never quite articulated sufficiently.

October 21, 2015

The media has dubbed him “Clock Boy,” but critics have pointed out that he’s really just Crock Boy. This hasn’t prevented Ahmed Mohamed (shown), the 14-year-old Texas student arrested for bringing to school a device that could be taken for a bomb, from making the rounds as a celebrity and meeting world leaders. This included an encounter Barack Obama at the White House’s Astronomy Night last evening, even though the meeting was left in doubt after Mohamed met last Wednesday with an African president wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

The boy’s dubious meeting with Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir — accused of orchestrating genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur — put the White House in an uncomfortable position. Obama had already committed to the now-discredited narrative that Mohamed was a fertile-minded inventor victimized by “Islamophobia,” and revoking his Astronomy Night invitation would have been a blow against that victim narrative. Ultimately, the administration decided to walk a fine line. Press Secretary Josh Earnest played down Mohamed’s visit at a press briefing yesterday, saying he didn’t believe Obama would “have an opportunity to meet one-on-one with Ahmed” as “several hundred people” would participate in the event. And so it transpired: Obama met with the high-school student while mingling with the attendees, but didn’t showcase his visit.

Unfortunately, Mohamed’s tale is an example of how, as Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…” And a tall tale Mohamed’s is.

June 29, 2015

Imagine you run a website and are ordered by the federal government to divulge personal information on article commenters. Now imagine that the feds also issue a gag order preventing you from revealing what they’re up to.

This is precisely what happened with award-winning libertarian website Reason.com

Site editor Nick Gillespie related his travails just today at the Daily Beast, and it’s a story many will find chilling. His problems began after he blogged about the life sentence handed down to Ross Ulbricht, founder of Dark Web website Silk Road, by a judge named Katherine Forrest. Not surprisingly, agitated Ulbricht defenders took to his piece’s comments section and, par for the Internet course, savaged Forrest. As Gillespie writes, they suggested “that, among other things, she should burn in hell, ‘be taken out back and shot,’ and, in a well-worn Internet homage to the Coen Brothers movie Fargo, be fed ‘feet first’ into a woodchipper. The comments betrayed a naive belief in an afterlife [note, my libertarian friend Gillespie, that people without that ‘naïve’ belief in an afterlife generally have a naïve belief in government] and karma, were grammatically and spelling-challenged, hyperbolic, and… completely within the realm of acceptable Internet discourse, especially for an unmoderated comments section.” Gillespie then continued:

But the U.S. attorney for U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York thought differently...

June 01, 2015

Pugnacious pundit Ann Coulter is in the news again, talking about her latest book Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole. As some might guess, its theme is that our current immigration regime — 85 percent of our immigrants hail from the Third World and Asia — is creating a historically unprecedented demographic upheaval that is changing the face of America. And Coulter, not one to shy away from controversy, has described this change as the “browning of America.”

As left-wing Daily Beast writer Lloyd Grove opines, this is “language that many doubtless will find hair-raising if not downright offensive.” Yet as he also points out, it’s merely a phrase Coulter “adopted as a negative after seeing it bandied favorably on MSNBC.” And, of course, the leftist media would never use such language unfavorably.

Except, there’s this story: The New York Times recently reported on what it calls the “gentrification” of the Mission District neighborhood in San Francisco (shown in part). Once a mostly Hispanic area, primarily white dotcommers — Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg among them — are buying real estate, moving in, and raising property values. Nonetheless, as American Thinkerwrites, “Nowhere in this article did the Times ever use the word ‘diversity.’ This is puzzling, because in every other article where they talk about adding more Blacks or Hispanics to a white population, they always celebrate that as the merits of diversity.” But then there’s what the Times does do: It describes the Mission’s demographic change as the “bleaching out” of “the Latino culture that drew them [the dotcommers]” to the district.

April 27, 2015

He has been called “one of the cruelest, most vile political activists in America.”

And now he may have his own television show.

It was a first when ABC Family aired an episode of The Fosters in which it showed two 13-year-old boys kissing. Now Disney-ABC Television Group is considering another first: a sitcom produced and inspired by homosexual activist Dan Savage (shown), a profane anti-Christian bigot who once said he wished his political opponents “were all f***[**]g dead.”

March 05, 2015

“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality,” wrote Lewis Carroll. And in recent times, reality has been losing that war. It used to be that you’d be asked what your “sex” was, and even flipping a coin yielded a 50 percent chance of being right. Now “sex” has been replaced with “gender,” and then the category expansion of “gender” became, well, a never-ender. And so it is at Facebook, where they’ve added to their 58 “gender” options the following:__________­­__.

That’s right, just fill in the blank.

What was insufficient about the original expanded selection? You can take a gander at the 58 options here and try to figure it out, but what follows is a small sampling:

February 25, 2015

In the tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a vain emperor is swindled by two men who claim they can make him a special suit of garments invisible to the stupid or incompetent. When he later parades around naked in public, no one wants to state the obvious for fear of appearing the only “stupid” person who can’t see what the “competent” presumably do. That is, until a little child cries out, “But he doesn't have anything on!”

Ex-NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s statement that Barack Obama was influenced by communists in his youth and doesn’t love his country isn’t nearly as fascinating as the reaction to it.

Usually when a person is labeled a “communist” or a “fascist,” it’s a pejorative applied to someone who, whether or not actually fitting the description, doesn’t apply the label to himself.

February 06, 2015

NBC newsman Brian Williams (shown) said that while covering the Iraq War in 2003, he’d come under fire. Now many are calling for him to be fired.

Because his story, which he has repeated more than once, is false.

Writes the Washington Post:

Williams said he was not aboard a helicopter that was hit by enemy fire and forced down — a story he retold as recently as last week during a televised tribute to a retired soldier during a New York Rangers hockey game.

On “NBC Nightly News” Wednesday evening, Williams read a 50-second statement apologizing for his characterization of the episode.

“After a groundfire incident in the desert during the Iraq war invasion, I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago,” he said. “It did not take long to hear from some brave men and women in the air crews who were also in that desert. I want to apologize. I said I was traveling in an aircraft that was hit by [rocket-propelled grenade] fire. I was instead in a following aircraft.... This was a bungled attempt by me to thank one special veteran and, by extension, our brave military men and women, veterans everywhere, those who have served while I did not.”

Williams emphasized his claim that his story was a mere error, saying in his statement, “I would not have chosen to make this mistake.” Yet many believe this strains credulity, especially since his aircraft was “following” perhaps 100 miles behind those that took the fire...

January 20, 2015

Never in the field of human conflict have so many cowered so much before so few. That’s just what Winston Churchill might say were he around today observing the political correctness that reigns in his and other Western nations’ media. And a prime example occurred this past Wednesday when a British news outlet suddenly and, some would say, comically cut the video feed (shown below) of a journalist complaining about the media’s refusal to show the recent Charlie Hebdo cover. And why?